Xaviers!

Everyone knows where the library is. Right from the entrance hall of the mansion and straight down the hall to where the corridor takes a sharp left and leads down to the dining hall are the big double-doors with the large windows in them, framed by the same old wood that makes up so much of the manor's interior design, with the two brassy door-handles right in the middle. They're positioned so one walks straight at them coming down the hall. Except today, apparently. Coming down the corridor students heading for the library would find nothing but wood paneling on the wall and, several feet to the left, the actual doors. In the window the usual notes and reminders, opening hours etc. except they're all jumbled up, like someone had rearranged all the letters and numbers into non-sensical anagrams. Including the curved stencils set into each window that should be reading 'Braddock Library'.

"What the...?" Chase asked the universe when he came upon the displaced doors and dyslexic notices.

Basil was right behind Chase, and began swearing up a storm at the sights before them under his breath.

"I can't bloody wait till I graduate and move away from this hellhole."

"At least it's never boring around here," he smirked. He went to open the doors and see if the library itself was different.

Grabbing the door handle to push it open Chase is zapped by a tiny bit of static electricity, not even enough to make him flinch back, really. From what he can see of the library through the open door it looks the same.

"All normal so far," he reported before stepping through.

It's the library alright, just from a slightly different angle than one would usually enter. The wooden floor right in front of Chase is the only thing that seems out of the ordinary. The wood-grain pattern and seams between boards don't really match up in a rough semi-circle around the door. Further in the library it looks normal, but around the door it's like the same wood-grain pattern is just repeated over and over without any seams or individual boards at all.

"Basil. Take a look at this," he said as he knelt to feel the odd patch of floor.

"It's as if someone photoshopped the floor together. " Basil moved around the weird section of flooring to grab a letter opener off the communal desk. As long as nothing prevented him, he would return with it and try to find a place to insert it into the odd section in an attempt to pry a board up.

It's hard to really find an individual board, but he does manage to get the letter opener wedged into a spot where the messed up floor stops and the regular boards begin and pry up a board of regular flooring, revealing the edge of the messed up floor. It looks similarly jumbled but, perhaps most notably, the wood seems to just kind of diffusely merge into the stone floor underneath. If someone clone-stamped the surface-pattern, it looks like the underside got smudged into the underlieing foundation.

"Cocked-Up flooring the whole way down....."

Basil ran the bottom of his foot gently over the mixed medium surface, clearly confused. Because the concept of 'You got your this in my that' wasn't as much of a warning signal towards bad juju to the boy who dated a gelatinous cube as it probably should be.

"Glitch in the Matrix," Chase nodded sagely.

Basil remembered the FUBAR sign and comments- "Let's check the books."

"Right. Good idea," he answered, jogging into the stacks to grab a random book.

Hurrying to one of the shelves the two pull out books to check if the scrambling on the doors has extended into the library itself but to their relief they find the ones they pull out to be intact, words and letters unharmed.

Basil shelved the book and looked back over his shoulder at the usual location the doors should have been to see if there was a second set of doors on the wall, or if anything else looked inappropriately shifted to one side.

The space where the doors used to be is filled with a new bookshelf, although one that doesn't quite mesh with the rest of them. It's wooden and technically fulfills all the criteria of a bookshelf in that it has flat sections filled with books but it not anything anybody would think to put together like this. The shelves are parallel to each other and the ground but they don't align vertically much. It's like an abstract painting of a bookshelf. The books themselves also aren't shelved properly, stacked horizontally on top of each other and slotted in to make them fit based on their size rather than any reasonable ordering. But they do fit remarkably well. There's no gaps or "wasted" space at all, all tetrised in there perfectly.

A less frustrated Basil might grab a tool to pull the books off the new, strange bookcase.

Instead, Basil marched over and pulled one off the shelf, opening it up.

For a moment all Basil can spot is nonsense sentences, jumbled words that don't seem to make any---wait, no, he just happened to grab Finnegan's Wake from the shelf. Grabbing another one he finds that the books are fine, although obviously not in the place they're supposed to be.

At first, it'd almost seem to Chase like Basil decided that everything was normal and was going to go about his job as he grabbed the book cart and began unloading the perfectly fine books onto the cart.

In reality, he was doing so to see if there was anything unusual behind said books.

Chase wasn't quite so dense as to not figure out what his friend was up to. He jogged over and started helping.

"Feels like we're looking for a secret passage."

Here and there it actually takes some effort to break into some of the shelves until the first book is pried out and they're rewarded with... the back of the shelf, the wood grain looking similarly clone-tool stamped as the floorboards near the door.

"No, just the original one." He commented, taking out his cellphone and snapping a few shots of what was before them.

"This is the part where I'm lacking... if you'd be so kind as to liberate those shelves from the wall with your feet my friend."

He nodded and tried to push the shelf aside.

Simply pushing isn't quite doing it, but after some less delicate application of force Chase manages to wrench the shelf away from the wall among the sound of wood splintering. It seems the shelves were somewhat fused with the wall.

Basil took more photos still, then attached them all and sent them to Ashlie in an email from his work phone, awaiting a reply.

"I really hope we aren't in Hollydale again."

"We've our senses and awareness this time, and we 'attacked' the simulation without a response from it, so I highly doubt that's the case.

The more likely scenario is someone or something is fucking around with the physical realm for unknown purposes. Someone or something not intending to be malicious by the fact there wasn't a counter response to you destroying the shelf, but that could cause accidental mayhem."

Basil did exactly as Headmistress Minamida had told him, Chase helping clean up the mess they created and putting out the appropriate yellow signs to tell people to avoid the trouble areas.

For most of the day he could be found posted up at the communal desk, helping people find what they needing and warning people to watch their step.

Chase busied himself by wandering the stacks to look for any other anomalies and occasionally examining a potentially interesting read. He had nothing better to do that afternoon.